The Internet of Things (IoT) has been an industry buzzword for years, but sluggish development and limited commercialization have led some industry watchers to start calling it the “Internet of NoThings”. Double puns aside, IoT development is in trouble. Aside from spawning geeky jokes unfit for most social occasions, the hype did not help; and, in fact, I believe it actually caused a lot more harm than good. There are a few problems with IoT, but all the positive coverage and baseless hype are one we could do without.

After realizing this opportunity I went out searching and believe it or not, 3D printers are already present in Zimbabwe, albeit on a small scale. As I write, there are some hobbyists who are doing 3D printing using PLA and ABS plastics. The printers are being used for prototyping and can be used to make once off customised products. One example shown to me was a case for a Raspberry Pi computing device

Currently Zimbabwe's average Internet speed sits at 3.05Mbps which is way below the global average of 17.9Mbps. Zimbabwe is ranked 106 in the world in-terms of Internet speed. At such speeds not much can be done in the connected world thus a lot of investment needs to be done to improve the bandwidth capacity to make sure that everyone benefits from the Internet of Everything.